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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

COLOGNE: Two law professors slam German law

Law Professors slam circumcision law

Two law professors, at the Universities of Hamburg and Passau, have
published a joint paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, slamming a law
passed by the Bundestag last year. That law, pushed through under
considerable pressure from religious interests, undermined an important
determination of the Cologne District Court that infant circumcision is
bodily harm.

Abstract
Non-therapeutic circumcision violates boys’ right to bodily integrity as
well as to self-determination. There is neither any verifiable medical
advantage connected with the intervention nor is it painless nor without
significant risks. Possible negative consequences for the psychosexual
development of circumcised boys (due to substantial loss of highly
erogenous tissue) have not yet been sufficiently explored, but appear to
ensue in a significant number of cases. According to standard legal
criteria, these considerations would normally entail that the operation
be deemed an ‘impermissible risk’—neither justifiable on grounds of
parental rights nor of religious liberty: as with any other freedom
right, these end where another person's body begins. Nevertheless, after
a resounding decision by a Cologne district court that non-therapeutic
circumcision constitutes bodily assault, the German legislature
responded by enacting a new statute expressly designed to permit male
circumcision even outside of medical settings. We first criticise the
normative foundations upon which such a legal concession seems to rest,
and then analyse two major flaws in the new German law which we consider
emblematic of the difficulty that any legal attempt to protect
medically irrelevant genital cutting is bound to face.